Archive for SIIA

Chris Anderson was first a physicist, then an editor for the Economist. Now he’s the editor of Wired. He also has some interesting hobbies, including a startup based around open source airborne drones. In other words, he’s uniquely qualified to talk about how “free” is transforming the software industry.

Opening up day 2 of the SIIA Software Summit, he presented some exerpts from the forthcoming book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (quite a lot of which is outlined in a series of Wired stories.) Chris was kind enough to give me an uncorrected proof a few weeks ago, and having read that, it’s clear this will be a juggernaut of a book. Free is a disruptive idea resulting from an economy where many of our marginal costs are falling to zero.

There are few places it disrupts more than the software industry, and Chris didn’t mince words with a roomful of industry executives: “The three technologies you guys depend on are becoming too cheap to meter.”

She thinks we’re taking innovation for granted. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants, particularly with the Internet. Breakthroughs like the Internet beget smaller innovations like the web browser; but we’re neglecting disruptive innovation and focusing on incrementals.

In a metrics-driven, measured, KPI-centric world, it’s harder to spawn massive breakthroughs because they’re more speculative and harder to justify with a priori knowledge.